Dr Bela Bonita Chatterjee

Office Hours:

Please note that I will be on sabbatical leave for Lent term 2015, please consult the Law Office to see who is taking over me as a temporary replacement academic advisor.

Location: C63

Research overview

Dr Chatterjee’s work interrogates interdisciplinary aspects of cyberlaw. She has interests in cybercrime, international law/international humanitarian law, conflict/war, security, gender/sexuality. She has published in prestigious national/international peer-reviewed journals including Child and Family Law Quarterly, the International Journal of Law and Information Technology and Sexualities.

B. Chatterjee and A. Macculloch (2013) 'How Very Dare You! Should we regulate offensive speech?' Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Sixth Form Conference, Lancaster University

B. Chatterjee (2013) Project MAYHEM: Re-envisioning peer support for Law students, a paper given at the Role of Technology in Teaching and Learning Conference/Sharing Practice Day, Lancaster University (see Projects).

B. Chatterjee (2013) 'Eyeballing Alcock', a paper/performance for Law and the Senses, University of Westminster, The Pavillion, London (see Projects).

B. Chatterjee (2012) 'Cyberwarfare: Challenges for International Law' International Law Group, Lancaster University (see Projects).

(2009) Co-organiser, British Association for Canadian Studies Legal Studies Group annual conference, Oxford University (in association with BACS and BACS LSG executive committee, funded by a grant of $(Can) 20,000, following an initial application for $(Can)25,000. This successful grant bid was a consortium bid put together by Dr Chatterjee in her capacity as Chair of the BACS/LSG in association, along with Ms Jodie Robson and Dr Susan Hodgett, Secretary and Chair of BACS.).

(2006) Visiting Fellow, Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Law, University of Kent

Dr Chatterjee has been an ESRC and AHRC Peer Reviewer for proposals up to £1 Million. She is on the editorial board of the Canadian Peer Reviewed Journal Frontiers of Legal Research. She has peer-reviewed articles for the following journals:

PhD Supervisions Completed

Christiana Markou

PhDs Examined

External Examiner at Manchester Metropolitan University, School of Law

Internal Examiner at Lancaster University, School of Law

Current Teaching

At Undergraduate level, Dr Chatterjee currently convenes Law 264 Lawyers and Society (2nd year quasi foundational course), and contributes to Law 330 Crime and Criminal Justice (final year optional course), 317 Legal Issues in Business (third year foundational course) and IWS 101 (first year foundational course). She is the double marker for Law 307 Courts Law and Politics in Comparative Perspective, and Law 310 Human Rights and Civil Liberties.

At postgraduate level she convenes LLM 5230 Introduction to English Legal System and Method (core subject on the MSc Cyber Security Degree).

Her convenorship of the Law of Torts 103r from 2007 to 2014 formed the mainstay of her shortlisting to the OUP Law Teacher of the Year Awards 2013, nomination to the LawTeacher.Net Law Lecturer of the Year Awards 2013 and her institutional nomination for the HEA NTFS Scheme 2014.

During her time at Lancaster she has also contributed to a wide range of courses, including:

Qualifications

Thesis Title

Chatterjee, B. (2001) 'Screwing with Technology': A Thesis on Cyberpornography, Cyberidentity and Law. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis is concerned with legal approaches to cyberspace and questions of identity. Whereas current legal approaches to cyberspace have been those of 'black-letter law', where cyberspace is conceived of as a 'neutral' tool, this thesis turns to the methodologies and approaches of the social sciences, where cyberspace is seen as an arena for social construction, and where questions of identity, particularly gender and sexual identity, are at the fore. Considering the question of how the cyberidentity might differ from the legal subject, this thesis draws on elements of various theories such as post/feminism, cyberfeminism and queer theory in order to expose the nature of the cyberidentity as postmodern, plural and fragmented. Such an approach highlights questions of identity and draws attention to the possible tensions between the potentially destabilising effects of the postmodern cyberidentity, and the legal subject as the modernist, binary subject.

In order to more cleary illustrate the tension between the cyberidentity and the legal subject, this thesis looks to adult cyberpornography and obscenity law as an example of this tension. The area of obscenity and pornography lends istelf as an ideal example not only of an area of discrete legal practice/regulation, but also as an area where cyberspace, identity politics and critical theories can be seen to intersect and coalesce. Having arranged the various theoretical perspectives and turned them to the study of cyberspace and cyberidentity in the context of obscenity law, this thesis moves to conclude that there may be major tensions between identities in cyberspace and identities under the law, potentially resulting in violence to cyberidentities in their encounters with the law. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the development of socio-legal studies on identity, and alternative legal approaches to cyberspace that are critical and theoretically informed - approaches that do not exist in the current legal discourse on cyberspace.